Free Agents with Hi-Rez Devs

Unless you have been hiding under a rock lately, and with the Zombie apocalypse on the horizon who can blame you, you have probably heard of Hi-Rez Studios. Hi-Rez is the team responsible for Tribes: Ascend, and the new little darling around the MMORPG.com office, Smite. We did not play either of those games last week; however, we turned our attention to the first game that Hi-Rez released Global Agenda and with it the new show "Free Agents" was born.

Global Agenda is a futuristic shoot'em up MMO that takes place on Earth in the year 2155. You take on the role of an agent that fights against the Commonwealth, an oppressive regime that rose to power after the third world war. The game plays like an FPS with character progression elements straight out of your standard RPG. Global Agenda runs on the Unreal 3 engine and still is visually impressive years later.

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I was joined by Gabriel "HiRezMug" Mughelli and Brandon "HiRezDuke" Dukes for this play session. Gabe joined Hi-Rez in September of 2011 and is a member of their public relations team. Duke has been a Community Manager with Hi-Rez for the past two years and started out working with the Global Agenda franchise.

We started the night not knowing what exactly to expect and within minutes were swarmed by other players. The Global Agenda player base came out in force. There were so many that our instance filled up and we did not get a chance to interact directly with everyone that came out for the evening. This was just the first episode in a series so take heart that if you did not get to pug with us there will be a chance to coming up soon.

We focused the majority of our evening on PvE content, but GA has a lot to offer in the form of PvP content as well. We ran multiple 4-man instances known as Special Operations Missions. Unlike most MMOs where you can expect to spend anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour running an instance these Spec Ops Missions are designed to take less than 20 minutes and reward you for finishing them in less than 15. This is great for the player that wants to log in and play GA but does not have a ton of time to play each session.

To spice things up Duke spent a good portion of the evening while we were waiting in queues dropping monsters on the unsuspecting bystanders (which by the end of the night were less unsuspecting and more requesting). You can see an example of Duke spawning Magma Lords in the Sonoran Desert at 44 minutes into the stream and sporadically throughout the episode.

If you were not able to take part in this episode we plan on doing this again in July. Look out for Free Agents - Episdoe 2, The Hunt for Gabe's Girlfriend. I would also like to thank everyone who mailed me items in game, and for those of you sneaky heathens that attempted to COD me items go check out my response to you at 53:00 minutes into the video. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns please post them below or feel free to e-mail me grakulen at gmail dot com. The next episode we will be PVP’n, so get them trigger fingers itching. I'll have my tanking axe ready! (You can see me axe tanking at 1:30:00 into the video).

Robert Lashley /
Rob is a Staff Writer and jack of all trades for MMORPG.com. When he isn’t blinding people with the glare from his head in front of a camera you can chase him down on Twitter, PSN, XBL, and Nintendo @rant_on_rob.